The National Institute of Justice of the United States Department of Justice has now launched a groundbreaking exploration of the potential for building “forward-looking accountability” into American criminal justice. Twenty jurisdictions have been invited to launch “beta” site inquiries into “sentinel events”, research solicitations for the coming fiscal year have been announced, and the ground has been cleared for carefully devised and evaluated demonstration projects in the coming year.

For over one hundred years, research psychologists have fought to have the modern understanding of human memory accepted in the legal system. True Witness: Cops, Courts, Science, and the Battle Against Misidentification, published in January 2005 by Palgrave MacMillan, and available through Amazon.com, tells the story of that battle, a battle which only now, after a tragic litany of wrongful convictions exposed by DNA testing, is beginning to result in research-based eyewitness investigation procedures designed to protect the innocent and catch the guilty.

This web page, still under construction, is an effort to gather for general readers, police and sheriff's investigators, social scientists, prosecutors, defenders and judges some of the latest material bearing on the reforms described in True Witness.